rather he is a deviant extraordinare who follows his personal desires
and aql over textual evidence and abandons the way of the ulema of
Ahl us Sunnah. May Allah swt protect us from his like. Ameen

Below is an article refuting some of his ideas from Sidi GF Haddad

As-Salamu `alaykum:

On the Khaled Aboul Fadl article in the New Republic:

After a lengthy process of textual research
and prayer for divine
guidance, he concluded that reports against dogs
were passed on through questionable chains of
transmissions, or contradicted by more favorable
reports--for instance, one story of Muhammad
praying with his dogs playing nearby.

... in the middle of the desert as narrated from al-Fadl
ibn `Abbas - with one puppy and one mule in the vicinity
- by Ahmad and Abu Dawud.

Aboul Fadl is a Mu`tazili and the NR is a Zionist magazine.

The article goes on to say that the man urges his wife to be
his imam in prayer. If his textual research is one tenth as
prudent as his law, it is no wonder he tosses out what is
ironclad to rely on imagination. Jahm ibn Safwan "prayed"
and "researched" for a long time before he came out with the
creed that God Most High is "the wind and the air all around."

Aboul Fadl does exactly what he blames fundamentalists for
doing: leaping over and royally ignoring meticulous hadith
scholarship and analysis so as to push something extreme and
unheard of, in the name of Islam, "engaging in a de novo
reading of the texts" and so on. He said in one interview:

"For fundamentalists 'ijtihad' consists only
of consulting the Quran and Sunna, ignoring
the interpretations of jurists through the ages.
It is liberative because it negates all the
accumulated interpretations, so you aren't
anchored. You approach the text as if no one
has ever read it before ['de novo'=from scratch]
and don't bother with consulting authorities."

He claims Wahhabis do not read, while he reads a lot, but
the result is the same: outlandish ijtihad. Of course he is
more palatable because he has ethics while they do not.
The article aims to paint someone who means well. But one
can be an atheist and have ethics: it is not enough.

`Abd Allah ibn Ahmad said: My father [Ahmad ibn Hanbal] said:

"The graves of the great sinners of Ahl al-Sunna
are a garden, while those of the ascetics (zuhhad)
among the innovators are a pit; the depraved (fussaq)
of Ahl al-Sunna are the Friends of Allah, while the
ascetics of Ahl al-Bid`a are the enemies of Allah."
(Ibn Abi Ya`la, Tabaqat al-Hanabila.)

This would apply to all Ahl al-Bid`a, whether they are modern
Khawarij or modern Qadaris, even if they are each other's enemies.

Most troubling to his ideological enemies, Abou El Fadl cannot
be written
off as a Westernized "Uncle Tom," a term puritans use to dismiss
American Muslims with similar open views. His work is
painstakingly grounded in classical Islamic sources, they
acknowledge, giving him the ability to
defend his modern interpretations with a dizzying command
of ancient traditions.

The materials found in the sections in which the classical
sources catalogue aberrations are not called "the classical
sources". If one burrows these syllabi of errors one can fish
out many an anomalous ruling but these are not "painstakingly
grounded in Islamic sources." Nor have any of the world
masters of the Prophetic traditions been known to recommend
this man as even a student in the field, much less one with
any command to speak of. A Mu`tazili would be in fact
especially handicapped in hadith as they are notoriously
ignorant of hadith and its disciplines. This does not mean
they cannot put up a display that would pass for knowledge to
laymen or in academe.

In one of his books he states, "The bottom line for me is that
I do not believe it possible for God to be unjust or ugly...."
In the NR he expresses the same thought in defense of dogs as
pets. This is not fiqh, this is hawa - caprice - "me" and "I."
As if all the Imams of the past believed it possible for God
to be unjust or ugly based on the fiqh of dogs! Have you ever
seen such a childish line of argument?

When the cause is his personal likes and dislikes, "objectively
approaching a text" goes out the window. This fundamental flaw
was pointed out by other readers on sri. As shown above,
this is precisely what he blames fundamentalists for doing
("In a literalist paradigm all you end up doing is projecting
your own prejudice on to the text").

The key here is the method of solipsism-as-the-bottom-line.
This is the Mu`tazili method, to set the subject as the
ultimate judge of God and man in the name, of course, of
enlightened reason. The subject alone decides right and wrong
according to "what is beautiful and what is ugly" (al-hasan
wal-qabih) unfettered by anything called Qur'an and Sunna
or the principles of the Shari`a applying in stodgy, rigid
(to them), demonized Sunni Islam: "He says don't give me any
intuitive, common sense, humanistic arguments..." where "he"
is Bin Laden and the defender of reason and humanism is KAF.

He would like to think he is the only alternative when, in
the context of Sunni legal thought, he is another latter-day
aberration.